News
SCI Interim Dean Childers Shares 2021 Annual Dean's Update
SCI Interim Dean and Professor of Computer Science Bruce Childers shared the 2021 Annual Dean's Update. "As we work toward achieving our goals and taking on new challenges in the coming year, I look forward to continuing SCI's story together with energy optimism, and thoughtfulness," said Dean Childers.
Behnam Rahdari, Alireza Javadian Sabet, and Peter Brusilovsky Win Best Demo Award
SCI PhD students Behnam Rahdari and Alireza Javadian Sabet and Professor Peter Brusilovsky received the best demo award at the 15th ACM Recommender Systems Conference. Their demonstration, titled “Connecting Students with Research Advisors Through User-Controlled Recommendation,” presents the Grapevine system to recommend research advisors to undergraduate and graduate students.
Please join us in congratulating Behnam, Alireza, and Peter on this exciting achievement!
Malihe Alikhani Receives Honorable Mention and Best Paper Award
SCI Assistant Professor Malihe Alikhani recently received an honorable mention for a presentation as well as a best paper award.
Project Led by Martin Weiss and Other Spectrum Experts Receives $25 Million Grant
The National Science Foundation's Spectrum Innovation Initiative recently awarded a $25 million five-year grant to SpectrumX, a spectrum research project which features SCI Professor Martin Weiss among its leadership. The project brings together experts from a variety of universities to develop spectrum policy and technical innovations.
SCI Faculty Get Grant from Google to Enhance Ethical Competence in Curriculum
SCI faculty member Yu-Ru Lin is the principal investigator for a $10K grant from Google titled "Cultivating Ethical Competence of The Next-Gen AI Workforce" to develop a multi-disciplinary AI ethics curriculum for both undergraduate- and graduate-level machine learning courses. This project will focus on cultivating ethical competence and technical skills to identify and address ethical issues in the AI field.
SCI faculty members Malihe Alikhani, Rosta Farzan, Rebecca Hwa, and Diane Litman are co-investigators for the project.
Malihe Alikhani Co-Authors Paper Urging NLP to Focus on Signed Languages
SCI Assistant Professor Malihe Alikhani recently co-authored a paper encouraging the natural language processing (NLP) community to include signed languages in their research. NLP is an area of study in computer science that focuses on helping computers understand human language and allowing people to communicate using technological tools like machine translation, voice-controlled assistants, and chatbots.
Panayiotis V. Benos Receives Research Grants for Projects Related to COPD
SCI Professor Panayiotis (Takis) V. Benos recently received research grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for two projects related to the study of the lung disease COPD. Benos' project "COPD Subtypes and Early Prediction Using Integrative Probabilistic Graphical Models" aims to build a comprehensive computational framework for disease sub-classification, identify stable COPD sub-types at the baseline and longitudinally, and build interpretable models of the disease.
Amy Babay Working on Project to Protect Critical Infrastructure
SCI Assistant Professor Amy Babay is investigating ways to protect critical infrastructure that may have suffered under a natural disaster, which provides an inlet for malicious actors to launch cybersecurity attacks. In a 3-year project titled "Severe Impact Resilience: Framework for Adaptive Compound Threats", Dr.
SCI and Dietrich Announce Joint Data Science Major Beginning Fall 2021
This fall, current and incoming Pitt students can begin pursuing a joint Data Science major between the School of Computing and Information and the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Sixty-one credits in courses across several departments will prepare students to enter the burgeoning field of data science with the necessary competencies drawn from statistics, mathematics, and computer and information science.
SCI Faculty Members Receive Pitt Seed Grant Funding
SCI faculty members Ahmed Ibrahim, Leona Mitchell, Matt Burton, and Hassan Karimi have been chosen to receive funding as part of the 2021 Pitt Seed Grant program. The program, now in its fourth year, provides startup funding to transformative projects that support the goals of Pitt’s strategic plan. Their projects are:
The Pitt Cyber Range
Ahmed Ibrahim, Teaching Assistant Professor
Malihe Alikhani Receives Best Theme Paper Award
SCI Assistant Professor Malihe Alikhani recently received the best theme paper award at the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021). Her paper, titled "Including Signed Languages in Natural Language Processing," calls on the NLP community to include signed languages as a research area with high social and scientific impact.
Constantinos Costa, Panos Chrysanthis, and Collaborators Receive Best Industry and Application Paper Award
A team led by Visiting Lecturer Constantinos Costa and SCI Professor Panos K. Chrysanthis received the Best Industry and Application Paper Award at the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2021) for their paper entitled "A Context, Location and Preference-Aware System for Safe Pedestrian Mobility."
Panos Chrysanthis, Constantinos Costa, and Collaborators Receive Best Demo Award at IEEE MDM 2021 Conference
A team led by SCI Professor Panos K. Chrysanthis and Visiting Lecturer Constantinos Costa received the Best Demo Award at the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2021) for their work entitled "HealthDist: A Context, Location and Preference-Aware System for Safe Navigation."
The team consisted of:
Rakan Alseghayer Receives Awards at IEEE MDM 2021 Conference
SCI PhD student Rakan Alseghayer received the Diversity and Inclusion Award and the People's Choice of Best Pitch Video Award at the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2021) for his work entitled "Racoon: Rapid Contact Tracing of Moving Objects Using Smart Indexes."
Incoming SCI Student Olivia Terry Receives Nordenberg Scholarship
The University of Pittsburgh has announced its 2021 Nordenberg Leadership Scholars—five exceptional Pennsylvania high school seniors who have demonstrated excellent leadership skills, innovative thinking, intellectual curiosity and community involvement. Nordenberg Scholars are awarded full-tuition scholarships to attend Pitt and participate in the program.
Named in honor of Chancellor Emeritus Mark A. Nordenberg, the program provides students with opportunities for continued academic achievement, leadership development, civic engagement and professional experiences.